Clarence Thomas

“I do think that our freedoms are at risk.”

“My grandfather was a man, when he talked about freedom, his attitude was really interesting. His view was that you had obligations or you had responsibilities, and when you fulfilled those o...”

“It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain...”

“Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.”

“There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard.”

“There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. In order to...”

“My grandparents had died in 1983, and suddenly my brother is out jogging before Mass, and he dies.”

“Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break th...”

“I hear people say it affected your self-esteem to be segregated. It never affected mine.”

“Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.”

“I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and wri...”

“I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.”

“My grandfather, as I said, was industrious. He'd had a variety of jobs and decided sometime in the 1940s that he would never work for anyone. He was also a very independent man.”

“I think, though, if I had to look at the role of government and what it does in people's lives, I see the EEOC as having much more legitimacy than the others, if properly run.”

“I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes.”

“I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.”

“When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborh...”

“The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.”

“I grew up in a religious environment, and I'm proud of it. I was going to be a priest; I'm proud of it. And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.”

“I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.”